by Bill DeSmedt
Knox nodded.
“Let me think. It’s been a long time, but . . . isn’t it because an electron is, like, so small that it takes a really high-energy beam of light, or whatever, just to get a fix on its location? So high that you wind up interfering with its speed and direction in the process.” Marianna looked pleased with herself at having recalled even that much.
“So,” Knox said, “a subatomic particle really possesses these two objective physical properties, position and momentum. They exist out there in reality, it’s just that our instruments are too fumble-fingered to fix on the one without hopelessly screwing up the other. That about it?” It was Marianna’s turn to nod.
“Well, the good news is you’re in distinguished company: Einstein himself thought the same thing. Spent the last twenty years of his life looking for the so-called ‘hidden variables.’ ”
“And the bad news?”
“It’s demonstrably dead wrong.”
“Say again?”
“Back in the mid-sixties, a researcher name of John Bell designed an experiment. Bell’s Inequality, it’s called. Took over fifteen years before anybody could figure how to carry it out, but when they did, Bell’s Inequality proved—proved, mind you—that our electron has neither a definite location nor a definite speed until somebody decides to look at one or the other.”
Disturbing stuff, if you thought about it too much. As Knox had. He paused long enough to flag down a passing beverage cart. Considering what they’d charged for these last-minute seats, Air France could damn well spring for another Dewar’s. He sensed it was going to take that much at least to get through this.
“Jon,” Marianna said, “I’m sorry, but I’m not seeing the relevance.”
“The relevance is that it makes particle physics a branch of psychology.—Merci,” Knox told the flight attendant as she handed him his scotch. Marianna accepted a Chardonnay and sat peering into its depths.
He took a sip and resumed. “A branch of psychology. Think about it: here we have the best-tested, most reliable theory in the history of science. A theory, by the way, that’s essential to the workings of everything from your laptop there, to these little seatback HDTVs for the in-flight movie. And what it’s saying, when you get right down to it, is . . .”
Just spit it out, he told himself. She won’t think you’re any crazier than she already does.
“What it’s saying, is: it takes conscious choices, by conscious minds, to make reality real.”
That, in a nutshell, was what had attracted Knox to quantum mechanics in the first place. And what he found so profoundly disquieting about it now.
“Of course, most physicists don’t think about it that way,” he went on. “They just kick back and do the matrix math. The answer comes out on the money every time, so who gives a damn what it all means, right? Almost nobody ever comes to grips with it on a gut level, ever thinks about what the world would have to be like for quantum mechanics really to be true. Almost nobody thinks about the void of indeterminacy that would be lying in wait beneath the firmest bedrock. Almost nobody thinks about it at all.
“Except me,” he said at last. “I do—I’ve been there.”
Marianna had gone to school in the no-nonsense, nose-to-the-grindstone nineties, when every third classmate aspired to be an engineer or an investment banker. Even so, she could relate. Dad had been a borderline hippie in his day, before Mom straightened him out. Some of his weirder friends were still back there, stuck in the sixties, walking wounded caught on an endless tape-loop of drug-induced arrested development. Others hadn’t made it out alive at all.
“It lasted maybe eight, ten hours all told.” Jon was talking again. “And included all the old can’t-miss tour stops on your quintessential bad trip. You had your basic luminous snakes, your freeze-frame visuals, your disintegrating flesh—the whole nine yards. But in the end, there was only the void. A vast, seething flux of noise and formlessness and meaninglessness. No one there, not even me. What the universe looks like when nobody’s looking.
“It was hell, I guess.” He sounded infinitely tired. “A vision of hell—the ultimate mindfuck.”
“But, Jon, it wasn’t real.”
“If it wasn’t real, nothing is. The flux is the substrate, reality’s ground floor. And, God help me, once I’d seen it I couldn’t un-see it again. The flashbacks went on and on for months.
“After a while, it was like there was no fixed form to anything, nothing to hang onto, nowhere to rest. I’d be looking at something real and solid—a tree, say—and all of a sudden I’d just . . . lose the idea of it. The idea of its being a thing in its own right. It would become radically contingent. Not something out there; just something in my head. Just a few bars of melody emerging for a moment out of the background noise.
“It was as if I could feel the winds of eternity howling through my soul,” he whispered miserably, “threatening to disperse me into streamers of indeterminacies and smear me out across the void.”
He looked up. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. He swallowed. “Well, you wanted to know.”
She’d seen men paint themselves into some strange corners before, but . . . but this was Jon, dammit!
He made as if to speak again, but she held a finger to his lips. “Hush,” she said. “It’s all right now.”
Not knowing what else to do, she unbuckled her seatbelt and, putting her arms around him, rocked him back and forth. She could feel his trembling subside as he relaxed in her embrace.
“There’s more,” he whispered in her ear.
She drew back to look him in the face. He looked better. Still pale, but back in control again.
“Jon, you don’t have to. I’m really sorry I . . .”
“Brought the whole thing up?”
She shrugged. Not what she’d been about to say, but close enough.
“Don’t be.” He tried to smile. “I’m not. Ever since then, it seems like I’ve been living out my life not letting anyone really get to know me. Because, well, really getting to know me would mean getting to know that about me.”
He hesitated a moment, then said quietly, “I want you to really get to know me.”
The kiss that followed left them both breathless.
“Anyway, I still haven’t answered your question.” Knox was feeling better. Incredibly good, considering. The way he’d felt after some of his most intense sessions on Friedman’s couch—as if the weight of worlds had lifted from his shoulders.
“Not now.” Marianna held her face up for another kiss.
Sometime later, he tried again. Couldn’t very well go this far and not finish. “It was a rough year, that next year. Hardly a day went by that I didn’t think about . . .” He broke off, restarted. “It was friends got me through it, pretty much kept me alive, I guess.
“Then, somewhere along about four months after the trip itself, something really strange started to happen.”
Seeing the look on her face, he added quickly, “No, no, not bad strange—that I already had. This was good strange.”
“Good, how?”
“Remember I told you how I could all of a sudden just lose an object in the background flux? How a tree would stop being a thing in itself and merge with the surrounding chaos?”
Marianna nodded doubtfully.
“Well, this was like that, except benign, somehow. I could look at that tree and see its interconnectedness with its environment, see it as one strand in a much larger pattern. A universal pattern. One of my friends—she’d been there too I guess—called it ‘seeing the net.’ On the good days the whole world would become a seamless fabric woven of faerie threads. There weren’t that many good days, but they almost made up for all the bad ones, got me through the nights.”
He paused. “I’m saying this poorly. There may not be any way to say it right. At bottom it’s a nonverbal, maybe a preverbal, experience. Kind of like what Pirsig meant by ‘Quality’ in Zen and—”
“—the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance. Okay, that helps some.”
Lord, had Marianna read everything in his library?
She sat there a moment in silence, then: “And I can see it helped you. But, Jon, I’ve got to ask you: was it, is it real?”
“As real as . . . the other. At least it seems valid as far as quantum mechanics goes.” The arcane theory had become his touchstone, his proof that he wasn’t crazy. No more so than reality itself, anyway.
“That’s what Bell’s Inequality really showed, you know,” he went on. “That the universe as a whole is a web of these interconnections. Phase entanglements, they’re called. Everything bound to everything else, renewing the bond from moment to moment, instantaneously.”
“Instantaneously? What about the speed of light? I thought that was an upper limit.”
“For a material object or a message. Lightspeed doesn’t apply here. There’s no real information being passed around, other than mere existence. It’s just a sort of a continual background murmur—‘I am here, I am here.’ ”
“I am here,” she echoed softly, leaning toward him again.
What a woman! Knox marveled. Marianna could make even quantum mechanics sound sexy. They did a little phase entangling of their own for a while.
“Jon?” That breathy single syllable tickled his ear.
Something about Marianna’s tone of voice snapped Knox back to reality, some note of regret coupled with resolve. He pulled back from her just enough to survey her face in the dimmed cabin light, and found the same mix of emotions there.
“Jon,” she repeated, “if this ‘seeing the net’ thing of yours really works . . .” She took a deep breath, “. . . then could it work for us? Here and now?”
“What? With Antipode, you mean?”
“Uh-huh. Seems like the more we learn, the less we know. If there’s really a rabbit in that pattern-matching hat of yours, now’s the time to pull it out.”
“It’s not like I can turn it on and off at will. I don’t summon the insights, they’re just . . . there, sometimes.” Knox executed a gesture midway between a shudder and a shrug. “If I could control it, I’d bottle it and sell it. And let the buyer beware.”
Come to think, though, there had been something the other night. Something Galina had said, at the banquet. Something that seemed to resonate somehow with one of Sasha’s old hobbyhorses—the one Sasha’d balked at talking about that night on the bridge.
“What is it?” Marianna said. “You went away again there.”
“Hmm? Oh, nothing.” Nothing that he was ready to share with her right now, that’s for sure.
But even as he reached out to draw her close again, he found himself wondering: what in God’s name did Tunguska have to do with really, really little black holes?
27 | Harm’s Way
SILENCE AND STARS. Arkady Grigoriyevich Grishin sat in his darkened headquarters suite, facing its panoramic starboard window, Mm watching night steal over the world. The stars were coming out, gems scattered one by one across a sable cloak. Only a faint smudge of twilight still lingered in the west.
The west, where his quarry had fled.
He glanced again at the strangely warped cylinder resting on the buttery leather of the desktop, glinting in the feeble glow of the dimmed display behind him. Looked at the distorted letters engraved in its surface, letters that spelled out an Air France flight number, an arrival time, and two foreign names.
Finally, he looked across the desk to where Merkulov was sitting, his slug-like carcass barely visible in the gloom. Even if Grishin hadn’t cherished darkness for its own sake, he would have preferred it to the sight of his security chief. How could the man let himself go like that?
Realizing he had Grishin’s attention—though doubtless not realizing why—Merkulov pursed his lips and spoke, his cracked tenor all the more jarring in the stillness. “Comrade Director, I recommend we drop this matter. Knox and Peterson will have surely reported in to their superiors by now. Whatever damage they could do has already been done.”
“Wrong on two counts,” Grishin said. “The probe tells us her name is Bonaventure, not Peterson. And your situation assessment is incorrect as well: they must still pose a threat, else why send the probe at all?”
Chastened, Merkulov held his peace. Not for the first time, Grishin wished he could discuss this with Sasha, whose understanding of such matters far exceeded his own. Regrettably not possible in this case, where Sasha’s erstwhile friends were concerned.
Or, perhaps there was a way?
Grishin swiveled his chair around and uttered a command phrase that brought up a new window on the wall display. It showed Sasha sitting slumped in his chair with his feet up, scanning a report on a data slate.
“Good evening, Sasha. Are you busy?”
Sasha looked up, then took his feet off the desk and sat up marginally straighten “Nothing that will not keep, Arkasha.”
“Then perhaps you can help settle a disagreement between myself and Vadim Vasiliyevich here. He claims that simply touring the Antipode Control facility would be sufficient for someone to guess the nature of our Project. To me this seems highly implausible. What are your thoughts?”
Sasha chuckled. “Are we perhaps planning on conducting such tours at our next Fort Lauderdale open house?”
Out of frame, Grishin’s hand tightened into a white-knuckled fist. That ’s right, sit there smirking, you fool! If not for your negligence, none of this would be necessary in the first place.
“Purely hypothetical,” he said at last, “merely a new slant on our old debate about whether surveillance is required within the facility itself.” Of course, events themselves had effectively answered this question in the affirmative, but Sasha couldn’t know that.
“A slant that assumes full access to the lab, yes?” Sasha sat a moment in thought. “Hmm, even so I would guess not. Your hypothetical tourist would have to be a person of great perceptiveness to piece together the secret of Antipode from so few clues.”
“What about, for instance, your friend Knox and his companion?”
“Is there something I should know, Arkasha?”
“Not at all. I only sought an example well known to you. Choose another if you wish.”
“No, no, this will do. I really do not know Marianna well enough to judge. She seems very bright, but perhaps not so inclined to speculate. Dzhon, on the other hand, hmm.”
“Yes?”
Sasha leaned forward. “You must understand, Arkasha, Dzhon knows half this story already, from discussions, er, many years ago. Perhaps he is not so ideal a subject for your thought-experiment after all.”
“No, no, all the better. Please go on. Knowing what he knows, and then seeing Antipode Control, could Knox work out the rest? Our capture of Vurdalak?”
“He is not the same man I knew in Moscow. The years have changed him. He seems deeper, in some way.” Sasha pondered a moment, then, “Under the conditions you have set—and given access to the historical records as well, of course—I cannot rule out the possibility that he might make an inspired guess.”
“Well, well,” Grishin said, “it appears Vadim Vasiliyevich has won our little wager. Thank you, Sasha, that will be all.”
Sasha looked as if he were about to say something else, but the window closed on him before he could get it out.
So the Project did stand in danger of being compromised—if, in fact, its secret had not been penetrated already. Or, no, what was it Sasha had said about the need for access to the historical records? Presumably including that infernal Jackson-Ryan article—that made sense. And his two fugitives might not have dug it up it yet. There could still be time!
Merkulov broke in on Grishin’s thoughts. “Excuse me, Comrade Director, am I then to order spycams installed in Antipode Control?”
Sitting neglected in the darkness, the security chief had concocted his own interpretation of the just-completed call. Dead wrong, as usual—the buffoon would not know subtlety if it wa
lked up and kicked him in the testicles! Ah, well, we must make do with the tools we are given. If one has no plow . . .
Grishin shook his head in resignation. “No, Vadim Vasiliyevich, it is far too late for that.”
Then his voice strengthened with resolve. “At the same time, it is imperative that this situation unravel no further. You will arrange to have Knox and Bonaventure met when they deplane in New York.”
“Uh, by ‘met’ am I to assume you mean—”
“Take whatever measures you think necessary—the Little Odessa Mafiya should be well positioned to deal with this—but stop them!”
“Are you certain, Comrade Director? With so little time to prepare, we must opt for a brute-force approach. There could be significant collateral damage. The resulting inquiry—”
“Devil take the resulting inquiry! In thirty hours, it will be of no account, no account whatsoever. Provided we stop them now!”
There was no stopping them now. Even allowing for the inevitable stack-up in Greater New York air space, Air France Flight on had landed just after eight in the evening. A short hop to Dulles, and they’d be home free.
As the Airbus taxied toward its gate, Knox suddenly found his arms full of Marianna once again.
She kissed him, taking her time about it. “Last chance for a bit,” she said. “We’re being met.”
Sure enough, two men in plainclothes were outside waiting when the forward pressure door swung open. They stepped into the cabin and nodded to the flight attendant. In response, she squeezed her way upstream around exiting VIPs until she was two rows past where Knox and Marianna were sitting. There she stood her ground. With her holding up the line, the aisle cleared quickly.
The larger of the two newcomers, a big, blocky, dark-haired man, sauntered down the now-empty aisle grinning at Marianna. “Good evening, Deputy Director.”
“Hello, Compliance,” she said, her voice neutral. “They got you on this babysitting detail?”
“Only as far as your transport. Matt here,”—he jerked a thumb at the black man behind him—“got stuck flying you back to D.C.” Matt flashed them a quick smile.